Two New Portraits Will Grace Senate

LAWRENCE L. KNUTSON

Published 7:00 pm, Sunday, January 12, 2003

Associated Press Writer

Portraits of Robert F. Wagner, an up-from-the-streets New York City liberal, and Arthur Vandenberg, a Midwestern conservative with a world view, are being readied for eventual display among the giants of the U.S. Senate.

Wagner and Vandenberg may no longer be widely familiar names. But in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman they were the stuff of headlines, policies and hopes for the American future.

Vandenberg, a Michigan Republican and former journalist, turned from prewar isolation to give his party an internationalist outlook. He helped build the underpinnings of mutual security that saw the United States through the Cold War.

Wagner, an immigrant janitor's son who wore his Phi Beta Kappa key on a gold watch chain, sponsored the 1935 law establishing Social Security as the nation's safety net for the elderly. He wrote the Wagner Act, which transformed labor-management relations.

Their oil portraits will occupy two round spaces high on the south wall of the gilt and frescoed Senate Reception Room. They will fill blanks left for history by the Italian artist Constantine Brumidi when he decorated the newly expanded Capitol in the Civil War era.

They will join a select group of just five other senators chosen nearly 50 years ago by a panel headed by Sen. John F. Kennedy, D-Mass. The portraits are expected to be unveiled during the current Congress, probably in 2004.

Wagner and Vandenberg were chosen to join such figures as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun after lengthy consideration by historians and curators and the Senate leaders of both major parties.

"The general public is not going to know these people, but they were chosen because they are so important to the history of the U.S. Senate in the 20th century," said Diane Skvarla, curator of the Senate collections.

The Vandenberg portrait is being prepared by Michael Shane Neal of Nashville, Tenn.; that of Wagner by Steven Polson of New York City. Skvarla said many think it would be best to allow another 50 years to pass before selecting new faces for the four round blanks remaining to be filled.

Vandenberg and Wagner came from two distinctly different political and cultural backgrounds.

"Wagner was a 'dese and dose' type of New Yorker and he could be rough," said Donald A. Ritchie, the Senate's associate historian. "He was a poker-playing, backroom, deal-cutting politician who was the epitome of the Eastern urban liberal."

Vandenberg, former editor and publisher of the Grand Rapids Herald, was an accomplished stem-winding orator. "As a former newspaperman he knew the power of words," Ritchie said.

A shy man, more at ease in the cloakroom than on the Senate floor, Wagner knew the power of ideas.

Born in 1877, Wagner was 9 years old when his family emigrated from Germany. His father was a tenement janitor and his mother took in laundry. Robert was a newsboy and might never have risen much higher had his brothers not saved money to send him to the City College of New York and then to New York Law School.

He was a member of the New York state Assembly in 1911 when he and fellow Democrat Al Smith were assigned to investigate the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire that killed 146 women sweatshop workers. The two steered 56 bills through the legislature to promote safer, more humane working conditions.

Elected to the Senate in 1926, Wagner quickly became known as a legislative craftsman. After Roosevelt became president in 1933 he played a central role in passing New Deal legislation. He took pride in the 1935 passage of Social Security and hoped that the Wagner Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board and guaranteed the right to form unions, would help workers "caught in the labyrinth of modern industrialism."

Vandenberg's Senate career took a different track.

Appointed a senator in 1928, Vandenberg became an eloquent voice for America's isolation from the dangerous turbulence of world affairs, voting against the Selective Service Act in 1940.

After Pearl Harbor, "a lot of his isolationism sort of crumbled away," historian Ritchie said. "Because he had been such a strong isolationist, his conversion was instrumental in bringing along many others in his party."

After World War II, Vandenberg backed the Truman Doctrine resisting the spread of communism. His support provided the key to congressional support for the Marshall Plan and NATO.

Soon the two senators will be a recognized part of Senate history.

"It shows that today's lawmakers do have a remembrance of the past, and that the past sets the mold," Ritchie said.

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EDITOR'S NOTE _ Lawrence L. Knutson is completing a 35-year run reporting on Congress, the White House and Washington's history, and a 37-year career at The Associated Press.